Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera

Mary Ann Smart

Abstract

When Friedrich Nietzsche dubbed Richard Wagner “the most enthusiastic mimomaniac” ever to exist, he was objecting to a hollowness he felt in the music, a crowding out of any true dramatic impulse by extravagant poses and constant nervous movements. This book takes Nietzsche's accusation as an invitation to listen to Wagner's music—and that of several of his near-contemporaries—for the way it serves to intensify the visible and the enacted. This productive fusion of music and stage movement often arises when music forsakes the autonomy so prized by the Romantics to function mimetically, underli ... More

When Friedrich Nietzsche dubbed Richard Wagner “the most enthusiastic mimomaniac” ever to exist, he was objecting to a hollowness he felt in the music, a crowding out of any true dramatic impulse by extravagant poses and constant nervous movements. This book takes Nietzsche's accusation as an invitation to listen to Wagner's music—and that of several of his near-contemporaries—for the way it serves to intensify the visible and the enacted. This productive fusion of music and stage movement often arises when music forsakes the autonomy so prized by the Romantics to function mimetically, underlining the sighs of a Vincenzo Bellini heroine, for instance, or the authoritarian footsteps of a Giuseppe Verdi baritone. The book tracks such effects through readings of operas by Daniel Auber, Bellini, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Verdi, and Wagner. Listening for gestural music, it finds resemblance in unexpected places: between the overwrought scenes of supplication in French melodrama of the 1820s and a cluster of late Verdi arias that end with the soprano falling to her knees, or between the mute heroine of Auber's La Muette de Portici and the solemn, almost theological pantomimic tableaux Wagner builds around characters such as Sieglinde or Kundry. The book shows how attention to gesture suggests a new approach to the representation of gender in this repertoire, replacing aural analogies for voyeurism and objectification with a more specifically musical sense of how music can surround, propel, and animate the body on stage.